This Sunday is May Day, a date
commemorated for various reasons, by varied causes, over millennia. For more
than a century it has been observed as International Labor Day. For hundreds of
millions of workers around the world it is an official holiday and millions of workers
will march in parades, cheer at rallies, and gather at feasts.

But in the country that gave rise
to this most important celebration of the global working class movement there
will be only token observances. Along with all the wealth we have produced
American bosses have also robbed us of our proud working class heritage.

In 1884 the Federation of
Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada—the lineal
ancestor of the American Federation of Labor—passed a resolution, introduced by
George Edmonston, founder of the Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners, calling for stepped-up militant action to achieve the
standard of an eight-hour workday: “Resolved...that eight hours shall
constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886, and that we
recommend to labor organizations throughout this district that they so direct
their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.”

The first May Day, in 1886, saw
peaceful strikes and rallies involving hundreds of thousands of workers in
communities across the country. Samuel Gompers, the
first president of the American Federation of Labor, speaking to a rally of
more than ten thousand in New York’s Union Square told the crowd that “May 1st
would be forever remembered as a second declaration of independence.”

The biggest
of these first May Day actions was in Chicago,
drawing 90,000 workers—nearly half of them already on strike or locked-out. The
packinghouse bosses promptly granted an eight-hour day. But other bosses, led
by Cyrus McCormick—who founded what was to become International Harvester (now
Navistar), and the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest newspaper,” the Chicago Tribune—set out to crush the
fledgling unions, and massive fights continued.

On May 3 the police attacked a
workers march on the way to reinforce the picket line at the McCormick Reaper
Works. Four workers were shot dead and many were injured. A rally was called
the next day in Haymarket Square
to denounce this police murder of peaceful protesters. When cops moved in to
try to disperse this gathering somebody threw a bomb into the police formation.
Then the cops opened fire on the rally. At the end, seven cops and nine workers
were dead and dozens were wounded.

No evidence of who actually threw
the bomb was ever uncovered. But eight leaders of the May Day movement were
framed by a prosecutor, who told the jury: “Law is upon trial. Anarchy is on
trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted
because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands that
follow them...Convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and save our
institutions, our society.”

The eight were convicted. Four
were hanged, one committed suicide, and three were sentenced to life
imprisonment. A few years later a new Illinois
governor, John Peter Altgeld, after reviewing the
facts of the case, pardoned the three still alive—as well as posthumously
exonerating the Haymarket Martyrs.

These struggles inspired the workers
movement throughout the world. The founding congress of the [Second] Socialist
International adopted an appeal by Gompers for a
“great international demonstration”onMay 1, 1890. The response
was impressive throughout Europe and parts of Latin America.
A half-million assembled in London’s Hyde Park. By 1904 May Day had become the official,
institutionalized global worker holiday.

But as the mainstream leadership
of American unions shifted from their class struggle roots to a class
collaborationist perspective, international solidarity withered and the
celebration of May Day in the United
States declined. During the Cold War, May
Day was red-baited as a “communist” holiday. The youthful indiscretions of Gompers and Edmonston have been
expunged from our official history.

Our holiday, we are told, is
supposed to be the first Monday in September, as sanctioned by Congress in 1894—signed
into law by Grover Cleveland in the same year he used the army to break the
Pullman Strike and send its leader, Eugene Victor Debs, to his first prison
term.

Personally, I’ve always celebrated
both holidays. But the official Labor Day in September has become a lot like
the traditional English Boxing Day, the first workday after Christmas, when the
grateful aristocracy would give their servants a Christmas present (a “box”)
and a day off in Christian appreciation of their labor. Our bosses tell most of
us—except for many in service industries—to knock off for “our” day in
September and take the family to the lake. Few unions try to organize Labor Day
events of any kind anymore.

Our loss of class identity, our
ignorance of our class heritage, is no small part of the crisis our labor
movement finds itself in today. We won’t get far without reclaiming our history
and traditions, without reasserting our class pride. We should paraphrase the
slogan popularized by feminists in the 1970s: “We are workers, hear us roar!”
What better time to start than May Day?

(I hope those of you in the Kansas
City area will join us at the Labor Party May Day Picnic Sunday in Macken Park. If it rains, we’ll move to Tony Saper’s house, nearby at 2113 Erie,
North Kansas City. Stories will be told and
songs will be sung over brats, beans, and beverages.)

Celebrating May Day this year will
be a step in the right direction on the path that must be cleared to escape
from the wilderness that imprisons us.